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Phil Shapiro often loans his Chromebook to patrons of the public library where he works. He says people he loans it to are happily suprised at how fast it is. He wrote an article earlier this month titled Teachers unite to influence computer manufacturing that was a call to action; he says that if 20,000 teachers demand a simple, low-cost Chromebook appliance -- something like a Chrome-powered Mac mini with a small SSD instead of a hard drive, and of course without the high Mac mini price -- some computer manufacturer will bite on the idea. Monitors? There are plenty of used ones available. Ditto speakers and keyboards, not that they cost much new. The bottom line is that Phil believes Chromebooks, both in their current form factor and in a simpler one, could be "the" computer for schools and students. Maybe so, not that Android tablets are expensive or hard to use. And wait! Isn't there already a Chromebox? And even a Chromebase all-in-one Chrome-based desktop? In any case, Chrome-based computers look pretty good for schools and libraries, especially if and when prices for the simplest members of the family get down to where Phil thinks they should be. (Alternate video link)

Phil
Shapiro:Hi, this is Phil Shapiro. I’m holding in my
hands my Chromebook laptop, this thing is so fast, it’s an Acer
C720. I take it to work with me at my public library job, I loan it
out to the public and I say try out this Chromebook and almost
everybody I loan it to is very impressed.

Robin
Miller:I’m Robin Miller for Slashdot, with us today
is Phil Shapiro, who you just saw on the intro to this video, and he
likes his Chromebook, he maybe thinks you should have one too. Why
Phil? Why the Chromebook?

Phil
Shapiro:I love that Chromebook, it’s so simple,
there’s so few things that can go wrong, it boots up in about
six or seven seconds, it wakes from sleep in one second, it’s
so light. I explain it to people it’s like a MacBook Air at
one-fifth the price.

Robin
Miller:Okay. And what happens when we are in the basement?

Phil
Shapiro:What happens when we are in the basement?

Robin
Miller:Away from our friendly signal, when we aren’t
online?

Phil
Shapiro:Oh, you can use your Chromebook offline, there are
ways of doing word processing, and so you can use it for word
processing offline.

Robin
Miller:Okay. How about for building a spreadsheet?

Phil
Shapiro:Yeah, you can do all your Google docs, you can do
it offline or online and then your Chromebook is going to
automatically synchronize it the next time you walk in to a WiFi
zone.

Robin
Miller:So, it’s not really a worry that I’ve
always had about being out of range of a signal when I use this
Chromebook?

Phil
Shapiro:No, those Chromebooks they are very functional and
the more that you live in the cloud with your work, the more the
Chromebook just makes so much sense, you get a lot of value for your
dollar.

Robin
Miller:What about iPads? Now there is a school district in
Texas that’s gotten some heat about having spent millions on
iPads, and their wireless stuff isn’t up to snuff, the students
are breaking them like mad and in fact the State of Texas, the
various school districts there are spending millions upon millions
upon millions for iPads, and you have a better idea I hear?

Phil
Shapiro:The iPad is not a bad educational tool, but I can
tell you in the hands of kids, those kids they put things through the
ringer and the Chromebook is so durable, it’s so light weight,
there’s so few things that can go wrong, it’s solid
state, there’s no moving hard drive inside of it. Some
Chromebooks do sell with hard drives, but those were some of the
earlier ones, all the current ones are solid state. And you can
easily store them in a small_____3:12 for
a whole class room, you don’t need to buy a laptop cart. Those
things are so small and light, you can almost fit them in the drawer
of a teacher’s desk for the whole class. Lock them up or
something and let the kids take them home, please, every weekend, let
the kids have unlimited use of this great tool that the school
purchased, but can be used at home, because it’s so light to
walk it back and forth, it weighs just a little bit more than a
Kindle.

Robin
Miller:You also talked, as I recall,_____3:46 and
we’ll run this for the people. Let’s hear Phil’s
thing with the teachers.

Phil
Shapiro:Wouldn’t it be interesting if I could buy
this laptop without a screen and without a battery and without the
speakers, so that it would be a very affordable desktop and very
light weight. So you see if we take off the screen and we take off
the battery and if we take out the speakers, we’re going to
drop the price in this thing maybe down to about $100, for a very
fast, very light weight desktop kind of computer, so I could send a
suggestion to Acer, the manufacturer that I’d like to buy it
without the screen, without the battery and without the speakers. And
they would probably ignore my request because it’s just request
from a single person, but how about if I assembled 20,000 teachers
who were all interested in buying this Chromebook without the screen,
without the battery and without speakers. If we assemble that many
people, we could ask Acer to sell it to us in that configuration.
Yeah, so, I totally love the idea that if people band together, we
have the power to tell computer manufacturers the exact features that
we want. And they would find it really hard to ignore that because
computer manufacturing is highly competitive.

So
if teachers are able to band together we can get some of these
Chromebooks without a screen and without a battery and price will
drop and we’ll call it our own little homemade Chromebox, but
the neat thing is, it’s going to be great for the computer
manufacturers, they don’t have to do any new design, they have
to sell us the same product with a different configuration, so
they’ll use the Chromebooks in the classroom when we want with
the screen and for home we could have a Chromebook with a VGA
out-port and a donated monitor and the kids could have a very
affordable computer for their home virus free.

Robin
Miller:When you’re talking about a monitor you’re
probably talking about a CRT at this point?

Phil
Shapiro:That’s true, I mean, we could make the
Chromebook into a ecological devise where instead of taking the CRT
monitors and throwing them in a dump or trying to recycle them, we
can put them to use, there’s no reason, and there’s some
gorgeous CRTs out there and I can tell you when you have a family
with four kids or five kids or three kids, educationally we want
every kid, every student to have their own computer, sharing doesn’t
work, one computer, two computers for a family, that is a recipe for
stress when the homework is due the next day. We need one computer
per student at home and the Chromebook is one of our best hopes of
having a very modern virus free computer right in the home.

Robin
Miller:Rather than pressuring Acer, ASUS or HP or whomever
into making something, have you considered just doing it with the
Raspberry Pie or a similar device?

Phil
Shapiro:Robin, that’s a great concept and I’m
all in favor of the Raspberry Pie as a tool that teachers can begin
to start building their own self-designed educational technology. But
the Raspberry Pi is quite a lot slower in speed. My Acer 720
Chromebook is as fast as a Core i3 laptop. It is blazing fast.

Robin
Miller:I have an older – not really huge it’s
same hardware pretty much, Acer Subnotebook, the main difference is,
it has a hard drive and a couple of friends of mine have now switched
to SSDs and have told me what you are telling me that if I stick to
an SSD in there, it will be the equivalent of a blazing fast new
Apple or whatever. So this is not specifically Chromebook, but yes,
having a Chromebook makes things simple because there ain’t
nothing there, it’s all in Google super farms and the
network_____8:26 computer,
the old one just replacing the hard drive with a SSD, I get really
fast, right?

Phil
Shapiro:That is true. That is true. But the very cool thing
about a Chromebook, if we move to say the Chromium operating system,
it’s totally free, virus free, license free and it belongs to
the public, the Chromium OS belongs to the public. Chrome belongs to
Google, but Chromium is more ours and we can modify it and we can use
it to our own needs. And so that’s really exciting that we can
just kind of cut out the financial entanglement that computer
corporations tend to have when their own interest need to intersect
with their pocketbook – interest need to emerge, there’s
no pocketbook interest with the Chromium OS, none that I can see.

Robin
Miller:You’re certainly not sounding like a good
capitalist, oh-oh. We are going to have to take care of that somehow.
No, I understand your point, now do you think you can get 20,000
teachers to pressure really computer manufacturers or one computer
manufacturer into making this______9:51 Chrome
or Chromium box?

Phil
Shapiro:That’s a great question Robin. I’m not
sure if I can assemble them, but I know that all the teachers that I
talked to who use Chromebooks just love them. They just love them. I
was in Arlington Public School this last week and I heard that at one
high school the teachers there are clamoring. They did not have
enough Chromebooks at the school and it’s meeting all of their
needs and taking away their stresses, so.

Robin
Miller:Let me just repeat this, not iPads but Chromebooks?

Phil
Shapiro:Teachers are clamoring for the Chromebooks because
it takes away their stress and it increases the amount of learning.
And it’s the most physically prudent way of using public
dollars, somebody is got to talk about how do we use public dollars
to increase learning, there’s nothing I can see that beats the
Chromebook for that.

I am not thrilled that this is considered a good idea. In principle I suppose you _can_ learn to program on a Chromebook, but only in a very limited way. If this is the wave of the future in education, some thought needs to go into how to design a programming curriculum that can work with these devices.

I must have missed the part in the article that said they were to be used for programming. The idea is that students use them for studying for all classes. With Chromebooks, it needs to be pretty much all web-based, but that should be doable. If they are teaching programming, they can get a few Raspberry Pi modules (kidding) or a few regular desktops with whatever OS you want to teach in.

I am not thrilled that this is considered a good idea. In principle I suppose you _can_ learn to program on a Chromebook, but only in a very limited way. If this is the wave of the future in education, some thought needs to go into how to design a programming curriculum that can work with these devices.

Not only can but many folk at Google do exactly that.They interact with the cloud of compute servers and VMs to their hearts content.It is not necessary but it is possible to set a Chromebook in developer modeand do the rare odd bit that cannot be done in their cloud. Schools could providea modest cloud server set of student resources inside a school VPN andhave a lot of control.

The point is that not only can you but this is solved at Google and with somemodest education of the teachers is easy.

A properly locked-down Chromebook doesn't let you do stuff like that. You have to enable developer mode. Presumably the point of using chromebooks is that they're easier to maintain, and that won't be the case if they aren't locked down.

And then you've got a developer used to being tied into that web app for anything they want to do. "Certainly not impossible" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. A cheap computer that's suitable for learning programming isn't a very high bar, and there are a lot of options.

Lots of people have always got attached to their first language or IDE or whatever, but the core skills learned are transferable. What's being talked about isn't vocational training; it's introducing, for example, programming to patrons at a library.

I think a Chromebook has some very good properties for a public library. They're not just cheap, they're simple and maintainable. If they couldn't support learning how to program at all, I think that would be an important disadvantage. But I think in the con

And then you've got a developer used to being tied into that web app for anything they want to do.

Dude, no-one is a "developer" straight out of high school. Kids who learn basic web-hosted programming skills in high school are still going to do a college-level course before even the most entry-level coding job.

They wouldn't be what I'd call an "engineer", and maybe "programmer" would've been a better word than "developer". I certainly would've described myself as a programmer before I was out of high school. You're nitpicking word choice without addressing the point that I was trying to make: limitations suck, and someone using standard tools is going to be able to find more material to learn from, anyhow. If the choice is between having a bunch of Chromebooks or nothing, then that's an obvious choice. If there's

I wonder if it were possible to run PNaCl code on the Chrome OS machine generated by another program running on the same Chrome OS machine. In the worst case, you'd need one web server to run in from, but I don't see anything else being necessary for this. That way, you'd be able to compile most reasonable things (C, C++, Go, Ocaml and similar) into native code.

A properly locked-down Chromebook doesn't let you do stuff like that. You have to enable developer mode. Presumably the point of using chromebooks is that they're easier to maintain, and that won't be the case if they aren't locked down.

A couple days ago, I traded in an old P3 XP powered laptop at a well known place I won't mention lest I be declared a shill. Got the cheapest Chromebook for 99 dollars.

Initial reports are that it is the most amazing 99 dollar computer I ever purchased. It still would be at normal pricepoint of 199 dollars. Fast and responsive in a way my better half's W8 touchscreen laptop would love to be, but never will. All that at around 18 percent of the price.

I just wrote a completely open ended HTML5/CSS/JavaScript app on my Samsung $250 Chromebook using the regular user mode and "Caret". I saved versions of the files on the Chromebook and ran them locally from Chrome. The app I wrote uses IndexedDB for local storage of snippets of HTML (which can include JavaScript). The app is intended to support boostrapping a better app by supporting experiments with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript. You can edit text and have it included as a section o

fine.I used Python Editor V3 http://editor.codnex.net/pythonv3/index.php to play with Python.There are plenty Javascript editors, with WebGL it can be fun.And if C/C++ is your favourite, there are probably online compilers for emscripten or asm.js and whatnot.

For some Chromereason, I feel like TFA is taking benefits of ***USING ANY LAPTOP*** and recasting them as Chromebenefits of using one company's product

Well, just off the top of my head - if these teachers don't push their students into using Chromebooks, Google will need to find some other method of collecting data and building shadow profiles on those people.

Well, books are consumption devices too, and there's room for them in schools. If all you need is a browser to gather information or prepare a report, it's not a totally dumb idea. And already my (middle school) kids use prezi to prepare powerpoint type reports online, then email the link to their teacher who puts it up on their Prometheus board (prometheanworld.com) for presenting to the class. They would be happy with a Chromebook if it ran Minecraft.

It's a platform that restricts the available choice of software, forcing content to be rewritten for a web interface.

Pre-existing content isn't an issue just for Chrome OS. e.g. A friend's grandchildren were forced to use an iPad for classroom use. Turns out they couldn't do a homework exercise because the educational material targeted flash.

Not true. In our elementary schools they are pretty much using browsers only with occasional word processing and presentations. The chromebooks are berfect for this. At this grade they are not doing any tech type stuff and if they do then they go to the labs. They are using the laptops for courseware not programming.

i don't think there's an age that's too young for students to start learning to program (Even if it's using symbols, versus numbers and or text) -- the concepts that they'd pick up along the way (logic, reason, problem solving) are worth way more than ipads, or any other $tech). And these concepts are not limited to just IT/tech.

We seem to have this bias that kids are too stupid to pick up things like math or science until they're in middle school, that sounds more like an artifact of the teaching method

I work in a K-12 school setting. And let me be up front about it...Google is Evil Empire 2.0. I'm not a fan of signing over 1,000 students to Google so that they can harvest personal data and target ad services to them.

But nobody, absolutely nobody does a better job at KISS than Google. With Google Apps, school districts can now setup dumb-terminal-2.0s (i.e. Chromebooks) at $250 a pop, teach almost anybody how to administer the @school.k12.xx.us user domain, and no longer depend on specialized staff for

> I work in a K-12 school setting. And let me be up front about it...Google is Evil Empire 2.0. I'm not a fan of signing over 1,000 students to Google so that they can harvest personal data and target ad services to them.

You think MS is any better? You must not have been keeping up with the news. Microsoft is worse - far worse - when it comes to harvesting data from k-12 students.

Umm, no, chromebooks are not just media consumption devices. I'm on one right now, find me another 100% Linux compatible laptop with a decent keyboard for ~$300USD. It should also be x86_64 and have a battery life of ~8-10+ hours with normal use and WiFi on.

QuickOffice / GoogleDocs ( even offline ) damn well better be good enough for highschool papers, it's good enough for college papers unless you are juggling enough sources to need a reference manager.

IF there is a deal to be made where you can get the Chrubuntu experience in the classroom then I think it's viable. I remember early phasing in of laptops for classrooms in the iBook days. It was not the best solution. Even walking students through the install process and setting up that account could be good for those kids interested in CS / Creative Tech. But I agree on your point that having staff that can make a good curriculum is more important than the actual brand of parts you put in front of them.

I sorta agree, but we must remember that this is the equivalent of armies always being ready to fight the last war.
Computers you can install Gimp or Photoshop on.

They do not need fancy TVs.

You can indeed do Gimp on a Chromebook. Note that I cheated a little bit, because I dual boot my chromebook into either ChromeOS or Ubuntu. But the concept behind the Chromebook is valid for the most part. While I'm not a cloud fan, the general performance of the things for webwork is tremendous. And I can boot into either OS in about as much time as starting a program.

We need to get people involved in schools that at least have some clue about technology and what would be most useful to kids.

And frankly, until we get that sorted out, you'd be better off buying the students $200-400 worth of notebook paper and pencils.

I agree wholeheartedly about the technology, certainly Pi's should be required, and hey, I still believe that slide rules are cool.

Giving previously discarded windows machines to students? There's no way a school's sysadmin would be able to support anything that's not homogeneous.

These things are a good option because the hardware is decent and dirt cheap. The school district can also install any OS they want to on them, not just ChromeOS. If you can find where to get an x86 processor (that's Haswell no-less), 2GB ram, and 32GB SSD on a laptop for cheaper than $200, I would agree with you. I haven't been able to find anything that

Why do people think that relying on a corporation's cloud for all of their computer use is a good idea?I'm fine with the idea of demanding low-cost computers, but why must it be Google's spyware'd up version of Linux? Why not some other solution?

But I think that schools should change the way they roll out computers -- have appropriately powered computers for creative work, and have a whack of these for consumptive work/staff tools/etc. Makes a lot more sense than a homogeneous network of anything.

For Chromium OS, a guy called Hexxeh had some builds, but he seemed disappointed by the performance, so the port is on an indefinite hiatus. For the Chromium browser, I saw posts that indicated that it could be built for and run on the Pi. I haven't tried it, and I didn't try to find binaries. For Chrome itself (browser and OS), Google doesn't seem to have produced appropriate binaries.

Yes, its been working for as long as I can remember. Well, Chromium, but it works, I presume thats close enough for you.

Its slow as balls because Broadcom is a bunch of pricks who just recently released the specs for A DIFFERENT chip thats much like the one in the Raspberry Pi, so hardware acceleration for graphics was pretty much non-existent. Maybe sometime in 2016 we'll see an accelerated graphics stack and chrome won't suck on it, but you'll be able to buy an iPhone 5s off contract for less than the r

Yes there are better devices out there, yes the Pi is now "slow", but its also old in a fast paced ARM race.But the Pi is designed for exploration and learning. Which is does not only as a device, but as a foundation an

You should read my whole post before you reply. Broadcom released the specs to a chip LIKE the one in the RPi, NOT the ACTUAL Pi.

The Pi was NEVER fast, it was ALWAYS crap and it just has a big following.

And just because you can run a few servers that do basically nothing... doesn't make it impressive. I can't say I've got a bit torrent client, but I can run FTP and Web servers, including SSL, on $5 micro controllers that will be more than happy to serve my personal requirements... and thats not impressi

It turns out they are not that much cheaper though, so I don't really see the value proposition in practice implied by Phil Shapiro since they are not yet $100 and screens still cost money:"Review: Asus crafts a tiny $179 Chromebox out of cheap, low-power parts"http://arstechnica.com/gadgets... [arstechnica.com]

I'm surprised Roblimo could miss pointing the Chromebox out, just mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Although he was right to point out the SSD speedup is significant for any small computer.

I'm a tech for a library system in California that piloted a Chromebook rollout at several of our large branches. Staff was fed up with the things shortly after testing began. These things just aren't made to take the wear and tear the average library patron gives them. It got so bad we had over half of our initial 40 machines in for repair at once. When we got them back (from Samsung, in this case) and asked branches to take them back, they actively refused; it was more work than they wanted to put in.

I was having this discussion about my boss's Chromebox. Which I was laughing at for being a thin client. "it'll revolutionize the world"" he said. "We've had citrix for years." I said. All this dies is give you a thin client where the server is any internet accessible site.

Given the fact money is unevenly distrubuted through the school systems, thanks to local property taxes, some teachers must buy basic supplies for their own students. Laptops will not fix the funding problems. We need a more stable source of revenue than local bond and property taxes. Once these schools get something more akin to a real amount of money to spend on educating their charges can we then even contemplate giving them laptops or chromebooks or whatever. Let's deal with the underlying problems

A chromebook is just a computer, and not really any cheaper than an equivalent Windows machine (slightly, but not much).

A decent chrome book that 'isn't slow' will costs you $250 AT LEAST... and right next to it on the shelf is the Windows $250 laptop that... works exactly the same if you run everything in a browser like Chrome.

Oh, and the windows machine doesn't start off with you giving everything you have to Google.

IMO: chomebooks blow windows laptops right out of the water, in many respects.

Every time I start my windows laptop, I want to groan: wait . . . wait . . . wait, while windows makes long series of updates. When I want to shut down it's the same thing. Even when windows is booted, it's not *really* booted - the computer is unusable because of so much crap going on in the background.

Plus I don't like being a victim of msft's non-stop format scams, and so many other vendor lock-in scams.

$250 for a decent Chromebook? How about $200 for the Acer 720p? Find me a Windows laptop with specs anywhere near it for $200- and it better include a SSD because the 10 second boot on a Chromebook is pretty essential. I can't even find a new Windows laptop on Amazon for $200, and the few used ones have Atom processors, 10" screens and Windows 7 Basic.

Yes, it's not a great development device. But it boots in seconds, needs no antivirus (or even maintenance), has a 8-10 hour battery life, a 13" screen and a decent keyboard and trackpad. Stick Linux on it if you want to hack away

A decent chrome book that 'isn't slow' will costs you $250 AT LEAST... and right next to it on the shelf is the Windows $250 laptop that... works exactly the same if you run everything in a browser like Chrome.

Google was running a deal last year where a school could get a chromebook for $100 a piece if you were at a school. My boyfriend was able to get an entire classroom set of chromebooks for $2000 raised through donors choose.

Spec and hardware wise they aren't the greatest things, but they're great for having everyone in the classroom do a quick online-based activity or other work without having to fight for the computer lab.

It is far better to get a laptop with local software and storage. Laptops are mobile devices. If you are mobile, you may not always have a net connection. Therefore local program/storage is far more productive then some cloud crap. Why not a nice netbook with a light GNU/Linux flavor like Puppy? Heck, even Slackware can run on modest environs. Go L/K/Ubuntu if you have to. You will have a far more useful device with a lot more tools at your disposal. Rasberry Pi can run GNU/Linux, and it is wayyyy cheaper.

Look, the landscape of teaching is shifting enough already. We're seriously going to drive these folks crazy if we continue to change major parts of their job on a yearly basis. The least we could do is give them a little time to catch up with the regulatory changes in teaching before starting on another technology refresh.

"After a year of planning, Penn Manor High School [pennmanor.net] has officially launched a 1:1 computing program. Laptops are in the hands of approximately 1700 students! Here are a few fast facts and notes about the unique program..

The laptops are running Linux, specifically Ubuntu 13.10, along with several dozen free and open source programs. Our program is believed to be the largest open source 1:1 implementation in Pennsylvania. By using open source software exclusively, we estimate an initial cost savings of at l

Sorry to say, from the slurring of the interviewer in the video, which suggested clogged arteries throughout your body. Check out health ideas here for unclogging them through nutritional changes:http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... [drfuhrman.com] http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar... [diseaseproof.com] "Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounted for 32.3% of deaths in the United States in 2010, but you can protect yourself. A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable (and rever

As TFA suggests a ChromeBook without a keyboard or monitor, something like a mac mini, I suggest a Raspberry Pi. You could get a trivial case and the power supply and still be in for under $50. Give each kid their own SD card paritioned into an unmodifiable boot partition, a modifiable 'system' parition for software, and a section for their work, and have all the benefits he's talking about, but even better. The kid plugs in their own SD card and gets to work. Could still back up to cloud, forgoing the